Faster-Than-Light Propulsion

"Without a doubt, the warp drive is the most important invention in Human history since the fire or the wheel."

- United States President in responce to the first warp flight in 2063.

Faster-than-light propulsion (FTL) referred to any method of traveling faster than the speed of light, relative to the rest of the universe. Most advanced spacefaring civilizations developed some form of FTL device during their history, because without the technology it would be nearly impossible to maintain a unified interstellar civilization. The three forms of FTL travel most used in the Local Group of galaxies were warp drives, transwarp drives, and hyperdrives.

Warp Drives


Warp Drives were  a common method of faster than light travel that make use of subspace to "slip" through space at speeds much faster than light. They work by partially submerging the vessel in shallow subspace layers to allow it to move in a bubble of stable space surrounded by stretched and compressed space. Warp drives were a very versatile, fast and reliable method of travel that was widely used throughout the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies.

The speed of warp drives are measured by Warp Factors, incremental, subjective methods of measuring the subspace submersion of a starship.

The value of warp factor ten is irrelevant; it is not a real speed but an incremental value where the starship is submerged in between the last submergable subspace layer and the layers where normal matter can only travel completely submerged. An good metaphor for understanding warp ten is imagining the factor as being the depth of water at which one, if submerged further into the lake, would go over their head.

The only method known of exploiting the infinite speed assosiated with warp ten is by using an extremely rare form of an antimatter reaction stabilizing crystal called dilithium, found only in the Delta Quadrant of the Milky Way. This form of travel, however, is highly unpredictable and causes side affects that are lethal the most organisms.

Transwarp Drives


Transwarp drives completely submerged a starship in subspace layers beyond the Warp Ten barrier. Transwarp velocities were, like warp velocities, were also measured in factors ranging from 11 to 20. Transwarp factors' relative speeds increased at a more linear rate than warp factors, but were much more fast than any warp factor. The disadvantage of transwarp drives was that to travel most efficiently and safely, the use of a transwarp conduit was necessary. Transwarp conduits were predetirmined routes through subspace, precisely tuned to allow travel without running into subspace microanomalies that could disrupt the travel and thrust the ship directly out of subspace. Transwarp conduits were accessable by any object that emitted a tachyonic pulse that conformed to the specific conduit.

It was possible to travel at transwarp without using a conduit, but the ship had to have a precise destination so that either the ships computer or a skilled pilot could plot a course to the destination that avoided contact with any astronomical bodies in realspace or subspace objects. Therefore, the routes of ships traveling at transwarp were almost never straight and were not changeable during flight.

Transwarp drives were extremely useful in intergalactic travel because only then could a starship travel in a relatively straight line to its destination.

Hyperdrives


Hyperdrives were an advanced and extremely fast method of faster than light travel. They were used primarily in the Andromeda Galaxy where the technology developed over thousands of years.

The reason for the slow development of hyperdrive technology in the Andromeda galaxy was because of the extreme rigidness of hyperspace travel. A hyperdrive required either a finely defined conduit such as the "trade runs" in Andromeda or an extremely stable region of space to jump through, free of large objects such as stars, black holes or temporal anomalies.

A hyperspace "jump" was a very short journey from one point to another in space, usually consisting of a jump to a high transwarp factor before entering hyperspace. A ship traveling through hyperspace could travel across the diameter of a large galaxy like the Andromeda in only a few weeks or days. However, as stated before, the ship would need to have a curved path to avoid stars, black holes and even nebulas.

In addition, hyperdrives required gargantuan amounts of power, in the trillions of watts for smaller starships to almost a septillion watts for large capital ships. Therefore, advanced, high mass antimatter reactors, very large artificial singularities or another high power power generation device would be necessary to power a starship with a hyperdrive.